NBC/YouTube "The Voice" Season 22 Battle Round on NBC
Charlie Puth just wrapped up his role as advisor for Camila Cabello’s team on “The Voice” during the Battle Rounds, but it wasn’t his first rodeo. The hitmaker has been an advisor on the show three times and he’s now made it clear he wants a promotion.
Charlie Puth Says He’d Love to Coach on ‘The Voice’
NBCCharlie Puth and Camila Cabello on season 22 of “The Voice”
Puth’s 2022 role advising Cabello’s teammates was his third time mentoring contestants on “The Voice.” The Grammy winner also appeared on the show as an advisor to Adam Levine’s team in 2019 and to Alicia Keys’ team in 2016.
When he filmed the Battle Rounds with Cabello in August 2022, a reporter from Extra TV asked Puth whether he’d ever want to be a coach on the show.
“One hundred percent,” he said. “I love listening to people sing and I love offering any bit of musical advice that I could offer, so I feel really honored and I feel very fortunate to be able to do this with Camila.”
As an advisor on “The Voice” during season 22, Puth often encouraged contestants to emote more during their performances and focus on getting across the feeling and meaning the songwriters intended in their songs.
“Your body is naturally gonna go to a place that you’re thinking about, a real-life situation that happened to you,” he told contestant Morgan Myles, who advanced through to the Knockout Rounds. “You’re gonna make people feel feelings.”
During that episode, he reiterated how much he loves being a part of the series.
“Being able to share things that I’ve learned and collected in my musical brain with artists on ‘The Voice’ fills my heart just as much as having a successful song,” he said.
Why Charlie Puth Tells Contestants to ‘Feel’ the Music
On “The Voice,” Puth often advised contestants on tapping into the emotion of their songs because when a performer doesn’t effectively relay a song’s meaning, it can fall flat. In fact, it’s why he has sometimes turned away other people who wanted to sing his songs — including huge stars.
During his first-ever appearance on The Howard Stern Show on October 18, 2022, Puth revealed that 10 huge stars tried to record his song “See You Again,” but none of them sounded quite right. So he recorded it instead and it’s his biggest hit to this day.
The song was originally meant to be uptempo because, he told Stern, “rappy dance songs” were so popular at the time, but it wasn’t sounding quite right.
According to Billboard, he wrote the song during a writing session with DJ Frank E and Khalifa, a “test” that Atlantic Records arranged to see if Puth could actually write decent music with some of its star songwriters. His record deal with Ellen DeGeneres had fallen through and, he told Stern, he was “a nobody” at the time.
He said “See You Again” was originally supposed to be a “rappy dance song,” but it just wasn’t coming together. Puth then sat down at the piano, just played the melody, and began singing off the cuff about a friend he’d lost in a car accident two years prior.
“That would be my message to him if I had one more thing to say to him before he passed away,” he told Stern.
The song turned out so well that the producers of “Fast and Furious 7” wanted it to be the movie’s closing ballad, as a way to pay homage to the franchise’s late star, Paul Walker. But they wanted a big name to record the song.
“We had 10 artists cut it,” Puth told Stern. “We had Jason De’Rulo cut it, we had Chris Brown cut it, I think Adele wanted to cut it at one point, I think Eminem was on the line to do it.”
But Puth said “none of the vocals had the feeling” he was going for.
“They might have experienced some sort of loss in their own way, but what I was singing about specifically, you just couldn’t hear it in their voice,” he recalled.
So, even though he was a “nobody” and just 23, Puth refused to give the movie’s producers the song unless they let him record it. Eventually, they agreed he could sing the vocals alongside Wiz Khalifa, and the song soared to the top of the Hot 100 chart for 12 weeks, launching his career as a megastar singer.
Puth has let plenty of other singers record his songs, though. His most recent mega-hit is the Justin Bieber and The Kid Laroi Number 1 hit, “Stay.” According to American Songwriter, others include Pitbull’s “Celebrate,” Jason Derulo’s “Broke,” and 5 Seconds of Summer’s “Easier.”
If “The Voice” producers are considering promoting Puth to a coach chair, it won’t happen anytime soon. Season 22 is airing now through mid-December, and NBC recently announced that season 23 will be Blake Shelton’s last season as coach and he’ll be joined by Kelly Clarkson, Niall Horan and Chance the Rapper.
No coaches have been named for Season 24 yet, though initial virtual auditions have been announced, beginning November 9, 2022.